Tim Docker wrote:
David Roundy wrote:
Which illustrates the point that it's not type safety
that protects us from segfaults, so much as bounds checking,
and that's got a non-trivial runtime cost. At least, most
segfaults that *I've* caused (in C or C++) have been from
overwriting the bounds of arrays, and that's precisely the problem
that Haskell does *not* solve using its type system.
That differs from my experience. Most segfaults that *I've* caused (in
C or C++) have been due to dereferencing null pointers. Type safety
does help you here, in that Maybe lets you distinguish the types of
things that are optionally present from those that must be.
Tim
Huh? Type safety buys you not having to worry about dereferencing stale
nonnull pointers (lifetime of reference exceeding lifetime of referent),
but nothing about dereferencing null pointers, which are the moral
equivalent of Nothing.
Failure to handle a null pointer is just like using fromJust and results
in the same program termination (undefined).
Dan
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